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BioNTech, the German lab behind Pfizer’s messenger RNA vaccine, has unveiled two twelve-container modules that will be installed in Rwanda or Senegal and possibly in both countries to manufacture the vaccine locally.
This mobile plant will be sent on site from the second quarter of this year, the first doses should be available twelve months later. Opening a conventional factory of this type normally takes three years. The challenge, explains the CEO of BioNtech, was to make the manufacturing process compact enough to fit in a single container, the idea being to standardize the 50,000 or so steps required before obtaining the vaccine.
Employees of the BioNTech laboratory will work on site at the beginning and then train local specialists in order to ” pass on the plant in the medium or long term ».
It is therefore a transfer of certain technologies, but without the patenting claimed by many developing countries, as well as by NGOs.
After Rwanda and Senegal, South Africa could be the next country to join this production network.
Africa is the least vaccinated continent. More than a year after the administration of the first vaccines against Covid-19 and two years after the start of the pandemic, only 12% of Africans have been fully immunized.